Are you a rare?

Inspired by a thread we found on the EU forums, which in turn is inspired by a thread on the US forums, WoW Insider began thinking about rare class-race combinations. It's interesting, really, in a world where you can be anything, how many people all choose to be the same thing. Doubtless, there are reasons behind it, more than just preference. Racial skills, for example, are likely a huge influence, but maybe others surface, as, with a little investigation, excluding Pandaren as they're very new, it seems that the three least popular races are also the ones that don't show off transmogs so well, and are perhaps less conventionally "pretty": gnomes, goblins and dwarves.

We headed over to RealmPop to check out their statistics and see what was the most popular and what was the least. Of course, no resource is completely perfect, and a few sites exist, but alas, the other well-known resource, WarcraftRealms, was offline. Looking at the US statistics, the least popular race, including pandaren, but by a narrow margin is the dwarf. The EU stats tell a very similar story, with dwarves outpaced by everyone, even pandaren. Why is that?

So, it makes sense that dwarves make up the race element of some of the rarest race-class combinations. Notably, however, although their total numbers are higher overall, the huge proportion of pandaren monks (64-65%) means that they're among the very rarest of combinations when playing anything but a monk.

Hit the break for the top 15 underplayed class-race combinations! Or should that be the bottom 15?

All figures are approximate and based on RealmPop's US and EU numbers combined.

Troll Monk: 17,100

Dwarf Monk: 17,700

Orc Monk: 23,200

Dwarf Mage: 33,700

Tauren Monk: 34,400

Gnome Monk: 35,000

Undead Monk: 44,300

Dwarf Warlock: 44,800

Pandaren Rogue: 57,100

Troll Warlock: 60,800

Orc Mage: 64,800

Dwarf Rogue: 65,200

Troll Death Knight: 69,000

Pandaren Mage: 70,100

Blood Elf Monk: 70,200

It's no great surprise that monks feature heavily in this list, given that they are the newest class, but players' choices are interesting. Overall, naturally, monks are the lowest played, but so many players have chosen pandaren monks. Humans are the next most popular, with 120,000 human monks, but 1.12 million monks are pandaren.

Mages are also interesting, they're certainly not as under-represented as monks, falling right in the middle of the popular classes, fifth in the EU and sixth in the US, but there are three mage race-class combinations here, only one of which is the pandaren, and they're still more popular than orc mages or dwarf mages!

All this information begs two questions: firstly, why are these fifteen combinations the least popular, with the exception of the obvious answers mentioned above, and secondly, do you play a rare class-race combo? If so, what drew you to that combination?